University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
THE RENCONTRE.

—Whittier.

It chanced, then, that, in the very hour appointed
for carrying into execution the bold project which
we have thus far traced, that Max Greyslaer, bent
on his errand of murderous vengeance, entered the
city of Albany by the Schenectady road, and, leaving
his horse at a wagoner's inn in the suburbs,
penetrated on foot into the heart of the town. He
had possessed himself, while at Schenectady, of every
particular relating to the place of Bradshawe's
imprisonment, and of the nature of the guard that
was kept over him; and, fevered with impatience to
accomplish the one fatal object which had brought
him hither, he proceeded at once to reconnoitre the
prisoner's quarters. Greyslaer, in all his movements
that night, acted like one who is impelled in
a dream by some resistless power within him; and
he was spellbound—if the icy wand of demon passion
hath aught in it of magic power above the
human heart.

He approached the house, and discovered, by the
glimmer of a dull lamp within the entry, that the
street door was ajar. He reached the door itself,
and, opening it still farther with a cautious hand,
beheld the sentinel stretched upon a bench in the

hall, and snoring so obstreperously, that, if his
slumbers were not feigned, they must be the effect
of deep intoxication. An empty flagon, which lay
on the floor just where it had rolled from the drunken
hand of the sleeper, seemed sufficiently to prove
that the latter must be the case; and, indeed, we
may here mention, in passing, that Stickney, who
played the part of the Helderberg recruit so successfully,
subsequently escaped the extreme penalty
of military law by pleading that his neglect of duty
arose from intoxication produced by a drugged mixture
administered by the family upon which the
prisoner and his sentinel were alike quartered—
their real connivance in the escape of Bradshawe
being known only to Stickney's superiors.

Greyslaer paused a moment to discover if there
were no greater obstacle to his ingress to the premises
than those which had hitherto presented themselves.
Suddenly he heard a step in the room nearest
to the street door; it showed that the family
which occupied the lower floor of the house had
not yet retired. Greyslaer startled slightly (did the
guilty soul of a murderer make him thus tremulous?),
and, turning round at the noise, the scabbard of his
sword rattled against the bench whereon reposed
the sleeping soldier. A light flashed momentarily
through the keyhole of the door opposite; and then,
as it was straightway extinguished, all became still
as before.

Had Max's mind not been wholly preoccupied
by one subject, his suspicions must now have been
fully aroused, that the occupants of the mansion
were quietly colluding in the escape of the prisoner.
But now he has ascended the staircase, and, pausing
yet a moment to loosen his rapier in its sheath,
he gives a low tap at the door of the room in which
Bradshawe is quartered.

“Enter, my trusty Joseph, most adroit and commendable

of burglars,” said Bradshawe, scarcely
looking up from the table at which he was writing
by the fickle light of a shabby taper. “Hold on but
a single instant, Bettys,” he continued; “I am only
scratching off some lines to exculpate my worthy
host from any share in this night's business, in case
the wise rebels should think fit to seize him. There,
`Walter Bradshawe,' that signature will be worth
something to an autograph-hunter some of these
days; and now—”

“And now,” echoed a voice near him, in tones
so freezing that even the heart of Bradshawe was
chilled within him at the sound; “and now prepare
yourself for a miscreant's death upon this very instant.”

Bradshawe looked up in stupified amazement.

“Do you know me, Walter Bradshawe?” cried
Greyslaer, raising his hat from his brow, and making
a stride toward the table.

“We're blown, by G—d!” ejaculated the captive
Tory. “Know you? to be sure I do. You're the
rebel Greyslaer, who, having got wind of this night's
attempt, have come mousing here after farther evidence
to hang me. But you'll find it devilish hard
to prove that I meant to abuse the clemency of Lafayette,”
added the prisoner, tearing to pieces the
note he had just written.

“I come on no such business,” said Greyslaer,
smiling bitterly. “I come—”

“And if you are not here in an official capacity,
sir, how dare you intrude into my private chambers?”
cried Bradshawe, springing to his feet and
confronting Max with a look of brutal insolence.

“Bradshawe, you cannot distemper me by such
tone of insult. Your own heart must suggest the
errand which brought me hither.” (The countenance
of Bradshawe for the first time fell.) “I

might have slain you as I entered; murdered you
as you sat but now with your eyes bent upon the
paper that you have since torn; but my vengeance
were incomplete, unless you know by whose hand
you fall.”

The passionless, icy tone in which Greyslaer
spoke, seemed to unnerve even the iron heart of
Bradshawe. He tried to return the steadfast gaze
of that fixed and glassy eye, but his glances involuntarily
wandered, his cheek grew pale, his soul wilted
before the marble looks of his mortal foe. “He
must have the strength as well as the look of a
maniac,” he murmured, catching at the back of a
chair which stood near him—whether to seize it as
a weapon of defence or merely to steady himself by
its support, we know not. But Max seemed to put
the last construction upon the act, as, with a discordant
laugh, he cried,

“Aha! he shrinks then, this truculent scoundrel—”

“I'm unarmed, I'm defenceless—a prisoner. If
it's satisfaction you seek of me, Major Greyslaer—”
cried Bradshawe, hurriedly, as, holding the chair before
him, he backed toward a corner of the apartment.

“Satisfaction?” thundered Max, interrupting the
appeal by springing furiously across the room.
The strength of Bradshawe seemed to wither beneath
the touch of the icy fingers that were instantly
planted in his throat. “Damn you, sir—damn
you, what satisfaction can you make to man—to
God, for driving me to an accursed deed like—this?”

His sword leaped from its scabbard as he spoke,
and Bradshawe involuntarily closed his eyes as the
gleaming blade seemed about to be sheathed in his
bosom.

But suddenly the hand of Greyslaer is arrested by
an iron grip from behind; he turns to confront the assailant

who has thus seized him, when Bradshawe,
quickly recovering himself, deals a blow with the
chair—of which he has not yet released his hold—
a blow that brings Greyslaer instantly to the ground.
Wounded, but not stunned, Max quickly regains his
feet, and makes a pass at the intruder, which only
inflicts a slight flesh wound, but not before Bradshawe
has thrown open a window, through which,
followed by Bettys, he leaps upon a shed and drops
into the garden below. Greyslaer hesitates not to follow;
but the mutual assistance which the fugitives
render each other enables them to scale the gardenwall
more quickly than their pursuer, and their receding
forms are swallowed up in the surrounding
darkness before Greyslaer has gained the quay to
which they have retreated.

The reviving air of night, the inspiriting consciousness
of freedom after so long incarceration,
brought back at once to Bradshawe his wonted energy
and hardihood of character; and when Bettys
provided him with a weapon to use in any extremity
to which they might be reduced in accomplishing
the final steps of their escape, the bold Tory could
scarcely resist the impulse to turn back and take
signal vengeance upon the man who had momentarily
humbled his haughty spirit; but every instant
was precious, and the fugitives paused not in making
their way to the point where they expected to find
Valtmeyer's boat waiting them.

They followed down the water's edge nearly to
State-street, as it is now called, and must have been
within a few hundred yards of the canoe—for the
garden of Mr. Taylor, near which it was moored,
lay close upon the south side of this broad avenue
—when suddenly the report of a pistol fired from
the house arrests their steps.

They falter and turn back. Bradshawe, hurriedly
telling his companion to leave him to his fate, turns

the angle of a street, and strikes up from the river toward
the heart of the town. He approaches Market-street,
which runs parallel with the Hudson, and,
hearing the tramp of an armed patrol upon its side-walks,
conceals himself behind a bale of merchandise,
which affords the only shelter near. It seems
an age before the city guard has passed by; and
Bettys, who, in the mean time, has thridded the
piles of staves and lumber upon the quay, and visited
the place where he expected to find the canoe,
returns to Bradshawe's side just as the patrol has
passed the head of the street, and whispers that the
boat is gone. Not an instant is to be lost if they
would now make their way to the suburbs, through
which is their only hope of escape into the open
country beyond. They cross Market-street—though
at the widest part—fly up the dark and narrow passage
of Maiden Lane, and gain the outskirts of the
town near the top of the hill, where the old jail, till
within a few years, stood frowning. The sight of
the grated cells in which he had been immured for
so many long months, lends new life to the exertions
of Bradshawe; and, with the agile Bettys, he soon
reaches the nodding forests, which at that time still
in broad patches crowned the heights in the rear of
the ancient city of Albany.

Let us now return to Greyslaer, whom we left
groping his way among the midnight shadows upon
the river's bank when the fugitives escaped from his
pursuit, and flitted along the water-side while he
was scaling the walls of the garden.

The escape of Bradshawe, under all the circumstances
which attended his imprisonment, wrought
up his pursuer to a pitch of phrensy that completely
bewildered him. It was not merely that he was
thus foiled in his meditated vengeance on the instant
when the cruel slanderer of Alida seemed placed
by fate completely in his hands, but the idea that

Bradshawe should make good his retreat within the
lines of the royalists, and thus triumphantly leave
the stigma which he had planted to work its dire
consequences, when he himself was secure and far
away from his victims, made Greyslaer frantic; and
Max, scarce knowing whither he hurried or what he
could hope for in his wild pursuit, darted hither and
thither amid the labyrinth of lumber which was
heaped up along the busy quays of Albany.

Now it chanced that, at the very moment that
Bettys was, with whispered curses, deploring to
Bradshawe the absence of the canoe, upon which
the safety of all seemed to depend, Valtmeyer,
whom the intervening piles of boards upon the
shore had alone screened from the view of Bettys,
was stealthily guiding around the head of the pier
at the foot of the street where the two fugitives had
halted until the patrol should pass by. The outlaw,
too, as well as they, heard the tramp of armed
men in the silent streets of the city; and, pausing
for a moment until the sounds of alarm swept farther
toward the northern part of the town, he plied
his paddle with fresh industry until he could run his
shallop into a slip or dock near the foot of the garden
where Max had first lost sight of the fugitives.
Here he landed, in the hope of still being in time
to prevent Bradshawe and his comrade from seeking
the boat at a point farther down the quay, and
taking them off from the shore the moment they
should make good their escape from the rear of the
house.

In the mean time, the darkness of the night, and
the other obstructions to pursuit already mentioned,
soon cut short the frantic search of Greyslaer, who,
emerging from the heavy shadows of the place,
thought that he again had caught sight of the fugitives

as Valtmeyer suddenly confronted him in his
path.

“Dunder und blixem, capting, I was afeard you
were a gone coon, and was on the point of shoving
off without you. Where's Bettys? We must be
off in haste! A rebel luder!” he exclaimed, as
Max sprang forward and attempted to collar him.
“Der Henker schlag heinen! The hangman strikes
in it, but Red Wolfert's rope is not yet spun.”

And, muttering thus, the giant, quick as light,
shook off the grasp of the young officer, and, leaping
backward a pace or two, presented a pistol at his
head.

“Miss me, you scoundrel, and your fate is certain,”
cried the undaunted Max; but Valtmeyer had
no idea of farther compromising the escape of himself
and his friends by the report of arms at such a
moment; and, seeing that the attempt to awe his
foeman into silence had failed, he drew his hanger
and rushed upon Greyslaer; the sword of Max was
already out, and the ruffian strength of Valtmeyer
found an admirable match in the skill, the steadiness,
and alertness of movement of his opponent,
though the darkness amid which they fought deprived
Greyslaer of much of his superiority as a
fencer.

Thrice did the outlaw attempt, by beating down
the guard of his opponent, to fling his huge form
upon Max and bear him to the earth; and thrice
did the sword of Greyslaer drink the blood of the
brawny borderer as he thus essayed a death-grapple
with his slender foe.

And now Greyslaer, who has hitherto yielded
ground before the furious onslaught of the other,
begins to press him backward foot by foot, until the
edge of the quay, upon which Valtmeyer stands,
permits him to retreat no farther. He grinds his
outlandish oaths more savagely between his teeth

as he feels his life-blood failing him, and, conscious
that his hour has come, seems bent alone upon
bearing his gallant foeman with him to destruction.
He hears the sullen dashing of the waves at his
feet, and glares furtively around, whether from now
first realizing the double danger near, or to distract
for a moment the attention of his antagonist, it
matters not; for now, quickly dropping his weapon,
he springs forward and clutches Max in his
arms in the same moment that a final thrust passes
through his own body. The wound is mortal,
but still the bold outlaw struggles. He has borne
his foeman to the ground, and, pierced through
as he is, with the steel still quivering in his vitals,
he flounders with his grappled burden toward the
water's edge. The life of Greyslaer hangs upon
a hair, as, with knee planted against the breast of
Valtmeyer and one hand at his throat, he clings
with the other to the topmost timber of the pier;
when, suddenly, the mortal grip of the dying ruffian
is relaxed. There is a heavy plashing in the dark-rolling
river, and now its current sweeps away the
gory corse of Valtmeyer.

But the perils of this eventful night were not yet
over for Max Greyslaer.

The town, as we have already noted, had been
alarmed by the scene near Mr. Taylor's premises,
and the streets were now patrolled in every direction,
either by a military guard or by the bold burghers,
who rushed armed from their houses at the first
sound of danger. Amid the excitement of a fight
so desperate, neither Max nor his redoubted foe had
noticed the turmoil that was rising near. But the
clashing of their swords had not escaped the ears of
the patrol, who hurried toward the spot whence
came the sounds just as the conflict was terminating;
Greyslaer had scarcely regained his feet before
he was in the hands of the guard—a prisoner.